By José Gandue @Gandour
I live in a country where I've heard the phrase all my life “"Everything happens here, and nothing happens.". It is a country where it is considered rude to hiss, protest, raise your voice, or criticize events without first apologizing. Where if one is mistreated in any public service and there is a complaint about said behavior, we are immediately labeled as boorish, ungrateful, vulgar. And to make matters worse, if what we object to has an apparently political content, there will be those who will despise us, with an authoritarian voice, calling us idiots, fucking leftists, subversives, enemies of harmony, troublemakers, second cousins of the devil, and other such nonsense. In many everyday behaviors, we continue to abide by the rules imposed by the most conservative of our aunts, the one who always carries a rosary in her hands and has an eternally inquisitorial gaze. This is the country where sometimes it's better to pretend to have good customs from past centuries than to take today's reality seriously.
Of course, this is a country with a violent history, and of the worst kind. We have lived through the worst massacres promoted by each of the extremes, in which life has had the lowest price in the world market. Here we have witnessed guerrillas bombing churches where civilians have sought refuge, and at the same time, we have also received the worst reports of paramilitaries playing with the heads of their victims in town squares. We have accumulated the largest number of internally displaced persons that almost any other nation on the planet can claim in its history, and we have more than eight million victims of a seventy-year conflict that many of those who insist on the old ways continue to deny. Yes, Colombia is a country with a very thick curtain at the front., who tries to cover up all his sins, because it's not good for us to admit our mistakes, because of what people will say.
The new generations have decided not to inherit this heavy burden of false prudishness, moral disguises that do not fit their bodies, past shames that do not belong to them. War, yes, that damned word, they don't want to keep incorporating it into their language. That's why they are utterly horrified by the deaths of children in government bombings, or by the hunger rates in some of the regions most neglected by the state. Many of these young people are ashamed of us because we repeatedly, thousands of times, let slip the opportunity to imagine something better. Their lament also includes the unease they feel when we speak of all this in hushed tones, because we don't want anyone to hear us criticizing the status quo. They're absolutely right to feel sorry for us.
These new generations want to march in peace. And yes, what I'm about to say will sound very hippie to some, But they want to do it by singing, dancing, showing their faces to the wind, and without asking anyone for permission. Furthermore, after what we did, we are not in a position to demand this or that attitude from them, when we did not save ourselves.
Many people from almost every part of the political spectrum in this nation are participating in this strike on November 21. Among them are many individuals who not long ago would not have imagined joining these kinds of activities. People who refuse to be afraid to genuinely express their pain over Colombia have every right to take to the streets and say so. May tomorrow be filled with joy, hope, and freedom. Hopefully we will all be able to march peacefully tomorrow.